Alienware 17 3rd hard drive FYI

Hey guys. Some of you may have followed my other thread on my warranty support wait time and experience, and I wanted to share a bit about the new replacement laptop that arrived this week. The other thread is linked below, if you are bored.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...anyone-have-experience-warranty-exchange.html

To summarize, I had a litany of problems with my M17x R4, and Alienware was unable to find a suitable refurb, so sent me a new model 17. Luckily, my specs closely matched one of their smart configs, so it was able to ship immediately after getting the specs approved.

Now, that said, it came with an 80gb caching MSata and a 750gb primary drive. Since I upgraded my R4 in the drive dept not too long ago, I simply moved them over to the new system (and formatted/installed windows 8.1), which consists of 2x 750gb seagate hybrid drives, in Raid 0, and a 1tb toshiba drive replacing the blu-ray in the 3rd bay slot. I use the 1tb as backup and code/file storage, and since the primary raid drives are already hybrid 8gb flash/750gb platter, I didn't config the 80gb msata for caching (fyi, I tried the msata as a boot drive, but it was a good deal slower than the hybrids in raid 0).

Immediately after installing windows, I noticed massive drive delays and outright stoppages of data transfers and video playback for anything stored on the 1tb drive in the 3rd bay. I tried messing with power options and drive idle timeouts to no avail, it was still having periodic data transfer issues. I almost thought that the new Alienware 17 had a new "feature" that paused drive transfers from the 3rd bay when the 2 primary bays needed priority, but that didn't sound like much of a feature, so abandoned that train of thought.

The forums and my troubleshooting were not much help in trying to find out why the drive was hanging and pausing frequently. Having a video loop 10 seconds of playback 5 or 6 times before resuming got annoying very quickly.So I started thinking more about what could cause this, and it really came down to 2 things, power or bandwidth. Alienware promotes quad drive raid for some systems, so I "assumed" that the bus was plenty wide, and if it can play blu-ray with no issues, a hard drive should be no big deal.

I took the 1tb drive out this evening and set it side by side with the 750 that originally came with my new 17, and sure enough, the advertised power draw for the 1tb is 1 amp and the 750gb only draws .55 amps. After putting the 750gb in bay 3 and copying 300gb of data to it from the old 1tb drive (now in a USB enclosure), I noticed zero issues, and although I haven't tried video playback from that drive, I suspect it will perform without hiccups as well.

The bottom line is, if you plan to remove the dvd/blu-ray and install a hard drive in your 3rd bay, check the power consumption of the drive, as it may be too high for the supplied power to that bay. Also, while the 3rd bay is considered to be convertible, capable of hard drives or optical drives, you still must buy an enclosure for the hard drive to make it fit into the slot and use the stock mounting points. (This is what I used for both the R4 and this new 17 2nd HDD or SSD Caddy for Alienware M15x (replaces optical drive) [OBHD-SATA12-SATA-NF] - $37.75 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks)

Cheers.

PS. A final word about the performance of the new 17 vs my old R4. They are nearly identical in performance, except I get a decent bump in fps with the new system. Odd, considering that I went from a 3740qm to a 4800mq processor. The video jumped from a 680m to a 780m, while both had 16gb ram, and the hard drives were transferred, so they are exactly the same between systems. So, if you are looking for a bump in video performance, it might be worth upgrading, but if you expect a large jump in overall performance, you may be disappointed. YMMV.

 

Follow-up: I've been running video and whatnot from the 3rd drive bay, with no stuttering. So it would appear that my suspicions were correct, that the 1tb drive which drew 1 amp was too much for the convertible optical/hard drive bay.

Just food for thought, if you plan on running more than two 2.5" hard drives.

 

Thanks for sharing your findings and experience, this will help the community a lot.

 

Did you have to get a cable to connect it or did the caddy connect directly?

 

Odd that it should have issues with a 1A draw as 1A is pretty standard for a hard drive. Could be your toshiba drive is not performing to spec and is actually demanding more than 1A from the system. Personally I wouldn't trust toshiba drives - i've got a huge pile of failed ones at work to back me up on that point!

You should be ok with the Samsung M9t (2TB Drive) as it only has a 0.85a rating.

 

@WalterL - If you get the caddy I linked, that's all you need to convert from an optical drive to a hard drive.

@simonmpoulton - It's very possible that the Toshiba was drawing more than its advertised rated amperage, but I have found them to be quite reliable for portable storage. When it comes to OS or internal data drives, I generally go with WD, but the Seagate hybrids were too tempting to pass up, and I am very happy with their performance thus far. If pure SSD's would come down in price, I would use them exclusively, except for backup needs, where platter drives are king in regards to price/gb.

 

"(This is what I used for both the R4 and this new 17 2nd HDD or SSD Caddy for Alienware M15x (replaces optical drive) [OBHD-SATA12-SATA-NF] - $37.75 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks)"

I have an Alienware 17 Mid 2013 model. I want to replace the ODD with a HDD. I was wondering if the mentioned HDD/SSD caddy will work with my model.

The reason I am asking is because, on the website there is another version of the caddy which is for the M17x R2 and M18x and I am confused as to which one to get.

Really would appreciate if you or anyone else on this forum could help.

Thanks in advance.

 

I've found this long time back http://www.ebay.com/itm/SATA-2nd-Ha...enware-M14X-M14Z-M15X-M17X-M18X-/290856204586